The Sea Watch

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The wall gave way. It was just a partition between one internal space and the next. No doubt its builders had never anticipated it being used as a weapon. The wall gave way, and the Kerebroi fell backwards onto a surging sea of spines.

  Stenwold had a moment to witness the man’s realization of his fate before a dozen quills had impaled him, some keen enough to come jutting out from his front. Then the push was coming from the other way and Stenwold cast himself aside desperately, as the Echinoi beast lurched through in a rippling tide of spikes waving like pike-heads. It filled the breadth of their narrow room, and there were Echinoi warriors following, lipless mouths snarling to bare needle teeth at them, weapons raised. Stenwold watched Phylles, who must have been almost within reach of him a moment before, scrabble to a halt and draw back swiftly. She was on the far side of the beast. They all were. He saw Laszlo gather himself as if to brave the journey across, but the monster’s spines were almost scraping the ceiling, leaving no safe gap even for a Fly-kinden. ‘Stay back!’ Stenwold shouted to him. ‘I’ll find a way round.’

  Then he ran. The Echinoi had spotted him, and he ran, stepping high through the swelling tide. He had no hope, just then, no hope at all. He wished only that Laszlo might go with Wys, and might find a way back to his family.

  The Echinoi feet, behind him, were erratic but swift.

  Thirty-Two

  Stenwold turned the next corner and found himself facing a battle. There was at least a score of Mandir’s warriors in furious close conflict with a mob of Echinoi, both sides hacking at each other with single-minded loathing. He splashed and stumbled across behind them, utterly unnoticed, but there were more of the invaders hot on his trail. He had a moment to consider who his enemies were: those who would enslave him or those who would probably just kill and eat him. In the end, the closer kinship won out.

  ‘Behind you!’ he yelled at them, as his pursuers closed.

  Two or three of the Greatclaw had just finished tensioning their bows, and at Stenwold’s warning they turned, craning past their shoulder-guards to spot the new enemy. The explosive retort of their weapons could be heard even over the melee, a pair of Echinoi hurled from their feet on the instant, one to lie still with half its head missing, the other to twitch and hiss, while its thorned hands plucked at the bolt sunk squarely in its chest. Of the remainder, all but one turned their attention from Stenwold to face this new challenge, descending on the armoured sea-kinden as savagely as beasts but utterly silent.

  That one pursuer would be enough, though. Stenwold gripped the broken spearshaft, torn between fight and flight, as the single Echinoi made a slow approach, heedless of its brethren’s success or failure. Eyes that were black and featureless examined Stenwold, and perhaps the creature noted that he was different, not its kind’s usual prey. Perhaps not, but its rough-skinned visage held no expressions that Stenwold could put a name to. It hefted its bronze sword, elegantly wrought into a forward curve, and went for him.

  Since its failure against the Onychoi armour he had almost forgotten the little snapbow, but Totho had made the weapon with two barrels, and one might still be loaded. He brought it up even as the Echinoi closed and dragged on the trigger.

  There was a muted click, no charge in the air-battery, even if a bolt was in place. Then that sinuous blade was descending on him. He caught the blow on his makeshift staff, but its impact splintered the spear-shaft almost in two, In desperation he lashed the crooked rod across the Echinoi’s face, snapping the weapon entirely but barely making the sea-kinden flinch. The creature swung at him again, overcompensating still in the thin air, and he saved himself by lurching backwards, tripping in the surging waters and tumbling from his feet. The scythe-like edge of the enemy blade passed inches from him as he toppled back. He still held two feet of haft, and he lunged with it as though it was a good Lowlander shortsword, but the jagged point only skidded off the Echinoi’s coppery cuirass, and then just as uselessly from its rugged skin. The sword flashed down again.

  Something the colour of bone put itself in the way and the Echinoi’s blade skittered from a shield of yellowing shell. An armoured form was stepping over Stenwold in one solid stride, shoving the shield in the Echinoi’s face and pushing it back. Nemoctes – it was Nemoctes, come from nowhere. He held a weapon like a hook-billed pick in his hand and, as he fended off the Echinoi’s next strike he drove the point into his enemy above the neckline of its armour with a grunt of effort. Keeping its sword away with his shield’s edge, Nemoctes changed grip on his weapon’s haft, ducked low and then put all his strength into wrenching it upwards. Even over the general row of battle, Stenwold heard the splintering of bone as the deep-buried point dragged its way free through the top of the Echinoi’s ribs. Then Nemoctes had cast the injured creature away, taking its last weak swing against his greaves.

  ‘Get up,’ he snapped at Stenwold. His dark face was grim, splashed with blood.

  ‘I have to get to Laszlo,’ the Beetle told him, clambering to his feet out of the water, for what seemed the hundredth time. ‘Laszlo . . . Wys . . .’

  ‘You have to get out,’ Nemoctes interrupted him. ‘Anything else is a luxury.’ The armoured sea-kinden strode ahead through the water, away from the melee, not even glancing back to see if Stenwold followed.

  He followed. He had no other choice.

  If I could have got out with Laszlo and Wys, he thought bitterly, Laszlo said she’d take us straight to the surface, to Collegium. But where will Nemoctes take me?

  Ahead he saw movement, and fumbled to raise his piece of broken spear. There was no enemy, though, but a rolling tide of water, coursing waist-high towards him. Nemoctes just forged on into it, taking the brunt of the water with his shoulder, with Stenwold standing in his shadow, clinging to the man’s arm to keep his feet. Everywhere abruptly seemed to be filling up fast, meaning the Echinoi must have cut a fresh gash in the brittle skin of the Hot Stations.

  ‘Nemoctes!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll drown—!’

  ‘Just follow!’ the other man snapped back at him, pushing ahead. Stenwold caught fragments of combat as they passed, glimpses snatched between one improvised piece of wall and the next: Onychoi and Echinoi locked together, tearing and clawing and chopping, shelly armour cracking, orange skin torn and hewn, all of them now chest-deep in water that swirled with their blood. There were things in that water, that bumped and jostled Stenwold invisibly and, almost as much as the rising tide, he had a sudden fear of a lopped-off Echinoi hand seizing him, digging its thorns into his skin and climbing up his body towards his face. It became harder and harder to force his way ahead even with Nemoctes, shield now slung across his back, half-dragging the land-kinden in his wake. Stenwold finally let go the useless splinter of spear and fumbled for the caul, though realizing that it was good for mere minutes of breath.

  Please not a drowning death, he kept telling himself. The sting of a Wasp, the poison of an assassin, the steel of a treacherous Mantis, a snapbow bolt, anything but this, anything. He would never touch the sea again, he swore, if only he was allowed back onto land. No boats, no ships, not even any long baths. If there are any of Achaeos’s old powers that can hear me, let me die a dry death!

  Something started grappling at him, and he let out a cry of panic at the thought that it might be those Echinoi hands, the writhing severed limbs come to drag him down. Then he realized that he had been stumbling forward with his eyes closed, consumed by his own fear, and it was only Nemoctes trying to wrestle the caul over his head. The water was now up to his chin.

  ‘We’re going under!’ the Pelagist warned him sharply. ‘Just let yourself go limp. Don’t fight me and I will take you out!’

  He managed to get the translucent hood over Stenwold’s head and then, with one swift motion, jerked him off his feet.

  Stenwold initially kicked out, but something came to him, some last kernel of self-possession, so that when Nemoctes towed at him, he folded himself into a ball, arms and legs tucked in as th
ough he was an infant in the womb. He had only the loosest idea of what followed, feeling a sudden rush of current against him, Nemoctes holding him firm despite it. Then there were no walls about them, and the armoured man was swimming upwards with sure, powerful strokes, dragging Stenwold towards his companion, his beast, the living thing that Wys’s submersible was just the empty shell of. A round, calm eye with a pinhole of a black pupil watched him pass, holding court amid a riot of pale tentacles, and then they found ingress via a pulsing hole where the thing’s body met the edge of its shell, and Stenwold entered Nemoctes’s domain.

  It was not like the cramped space in which Gribbern had lived out his life, nor the great window on to the world that was Lyess’s world. It was a house of many rooms, each one smaller than the last, and all cluttered with the memorabilia of Nemoctes’s life. There were shells and skulls on the opal-white walls, and weapons and armour too, undoubtedly relics of past conquests. There were arrangements of gold and precious stones that would have beggared some Collegium magnates. There were statues and figurines, most no more than a hand’s breadth high, fashioned in jade and jet, pearl and soapstone, depicting warriors and beautiful women, stern tyrants and rampant beasts. Many of these figures were so stylized that Stenwold could not recognize the kinden represented, or sometimes even the subject matter. Above all, there were racks and racks of the sea-kinden’s thick paper, some pages bound into sheaves, some simply lying loosely in stacks. The unfamiliar script on them gave no suggestion as to whether they were fables or histories or collections of trade accounts.

  Stenwold slowly uncurled, letting the last dregs of the sea run off him. He removed the caul from his head, knowing that he had escaped the ocean’s drowning death once more, but that his luck in that respect could not last for ever.

  ‘I have to get to land,’ he got out.

  ‘It seems that way,’ came Nemoctes’s voice.

  Stenwold sat up to see the man untying his armour, plate by plate, setting each piece carefully aside.

  ‘What will you do with me?’ Stenwold asked him.

  Nemoctes shrugged. ‘Matters have become more complicated since last we spoke. The Hermatyre politics, that’s one thing, but there have been . . . other developments. There is another conclave of those that bear Claeon no love, but perhaps you will be more than just a commodity.’

  ‘Really?’ Stenwold held on to no hope. ‘Nemoctes . . .’ it was a dangerous question, but the sights he had seen during the attack on the Hot Stations would not leave him alone, ‘did you lead the Echinoi there?’

  At last the Kerebroi stopped, his breastplate lifted half away. ‘The Hot Stations are used to Pelagists warning them of visitors, be they Echinoi raiders or the Benthic Trains. I did not lead them there, nor could I, but I asked my people to remain silent. I am not proud, but Mandir challenged me, and all my kind, when he removed you from my protection. I felt honour bound to secure your escape, and I saw no other means.’

  Stenwold nodded bleakly, wondering if he should feel the weight of all those deaths on his conscience too. In truth he had been a prisoner too long – of Claeon, of Mandir, of the sea itself – and now had had precious little sympathy to spare. Save for Tseitus perhaps, who thought I had come to rescue him. Tseitus who would never see the sun again. Stenwold shook his head wearily, the brutal violence of the last hour still echoing in the back of his mind. Tseitus who deserved better.

  ‘The Echinoi . . .’ he said slowly. ‘Will they destroy the Stations? Will they win?’ And when Nemoctes just shook his head, Stenwold pressed on, ‘Then I don’t understand. What was the point for them, even? They died. I saw them killed, and they didn’t even seem to care.’

  ‘You saw precious few die, I’d say,’ Nemoctes told him. He had taken up a decanter of silver, wrought into the perfect shape of a conch, and now poured Stenwold a measure into a cup like an eggshell.

  Stenwold took the drink gingerly. ‘I saw them die, hacked to pieces.’ The liquid was fierce and bracing, a like strong fortified wine.

  ‘Hacked and dead are different things.’ His armour gone, Nemoctes eased himself down to the floor, his back against the curving wall. He looked a lot older, then, than Stenwold had assumed, for the mail had lent him a tenuous strength. ‘They do not feel pain like us. They do not bleed like us.’ He gave Stenwold a level glance. ‘Like us people of the sea, anyway. I cannot vouch for your kind, but I’d wager you’re more like us than like the Echinoi. They have become lost in their Art, grown too much like their creatures. For them, wounds that would kill a man three times over will seal up within their flesh, and they can lose arms, legs, who knows what else, and grow back what was lost. Some even say that their limbs, severed from them, grow entire new bodies. Some say raids like these are how they get more Echinoi, that they have grown so far away from us that they have no children amongst them at all. Certainly they live wholly without air, and there is not a Pelagist, even, who can claim to have seen any but the full-grown monsters you met. They are our plague, and I feel sick that I may have aided them in any way.’ He drained his cup, tilted his head up to gaze at the arched ceiling. The sense of movement was distant, and Stenwold had to concentrate hard to feel the beast that carried them coursing smoothly through the waters. They might almost be in some scholar’s windowless study, or some magnate’s private room.

  ‘You’ll be returning to your land soon,’ Nemoctes told him, still staring upwards.

  Stenwold was suddenly alert, feeling hope clutch at him with thin fingers. ‘You know . . . ?’

  ‘Things have changed,’ the sea-kinden told him, ‘as you’ll see. Wys wants you returned, I know, and so do I and mine, and now I think Heiracles will find his wishes of less importance than before. Tell me, would you try to find the heir, if you could?’

  It was a subject that Stenwold had given much thought to, as he scribed and sketched for Mandir. If he were free, if that mad dream ever came to pass, would he not rather blot the sea-kinden from his mind, like a nightmare? Surely he would not spend a precious minute beneath the sky in seeking to help them.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, without hesitation, drawing Nemoctes’s questioning gaze.

  ‘Even if you had escaped with Wys, and been taken straight home without these interruptions?’ the sea-kinden probed, his wry smile showing that he knew full well what the plan had been.

  ‘Even then,’ Stenwold told him. ‘I have my reasons.’

  ‘Of that I have no doubt.’ Nemoctes nodded slowly. ‘It will be a while of travelling, to reach our outpost – a place at the edge of Hermatyre’s domain, where Heiracles has supporters but Claeon, I hope, has none. A place near the cliffs that rise towards your land. You’ll need some sleep, between now and then.’

  After he had slept, tired enough by then to drown any dreams that hovered, and after the horror of the Echinoi was far enough behind them, Stenwold asked about Lyess.

  Nemoctes grunted as soon as the name was uttered. He was sitting cross-legged at the broadest end of his suite of chambers, presumably in communication with the creature that was carrying them. ‘I know less than you think,’ was all he said.

  ‘Has she . . . there must have been others . . . ?’

  ‘That she has travelled with? Not that I’ve known, and I’ve known her for a good many moons. She owes me no great favours. Why she broke her lifelong rule, I cannot say.’ Nemoctes sighed. ‘She . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She asked after you, when you were in the Stations. She has been . . . distracted. Not seeming herself. As if I were any judge of what her “self” should be like.’

  A hundred questions warred in Stenwold’s mouth, but he let none of them out. Somewhere out there, surely not far in terms of how the Pelagists measured their vastly travelled lives, floated her glowing garden and the impossible glory that was her companion.

  Waiting for him? Somehow he was sure of it. The thought set his pulse racing, but mostly in fear of what he did not understand. Why do I care? I do n
ot care. The lonely, alien woman has a claim on my sympathy, no more. So what is this? What is this . . . ?

  The place Nemoctes ferried him to was like Hermatyre writ small. Somehow some Archetoi builders had picked this barren knoll on the sea floor as their project, and now the twisted spires of a new colony had formed, a solitary hall compared to Hermatyre’s sprawling city.

  The Archetoi were much in evidence inside, passing on their wordless errands, their eyes not deigning to follow or acknowledge their visitors. They were pallid little men and women, their skins tattooed with intricate, accreated patterns, going about their business in a world that barely admitted the existence of the rest of humanity.

  They ran into Wys’s crew first, just as recently arrived. She gave Stenwold a slightly exasperated look: here was a man who could have been home by now, had he jumped left instead of right. Laszlo had a grin for him, though, albeit a strained one. He was looking pale as a sea-kinden himself by now, and gaunt with it. Stenwold remembered Mandir saying how landsmen never lasted long in the Stations. We are not meant to be here, and our bodies know it. The gloom, even the air, it is all a slow poison to us.

  ‘What’s this in aid of ?’ Wys demanded of Nemoctes, who was clad in his mail once more. ‘More Kerebroi games?’ Phylles and Fel squared off behind her, their belligerence dominating her small stature.

  ‘For once the games have grown too large for anybody to control,’ Nemoctes told her. ‘Not Claeon nor Heiracles nor I.’ He led the way through to the vaulted, cavernous, empty heart of the new colony. The ceiling was heavy with projecting stalactites and fins that would in time become the pillars and walls of the structure’s internal architecture, but for now all that the Archetoi had constructed was a shell. Beneath that arching space two groups stood with a distinct distance between them. One was a rabble of Kerebroi, Heiracles at their head and Paladyra in their midst like a valuable hostage. And the other . . .